Apple expands Google DoubleClick ad serving on the News platform to all publishers

May 15, 2018

Following a limited testing last year, all publishers that make their content accessible to Apple users through the stock News app can now use Google’s DoubleClick for Publishers service.

Google’s ad-serving system can be taken advantage of to serve various types of advertisements on Apple News, including banner ads and animated GIFs. Pre-roll video ads and HTML5-based ads currently cannot be injected into News content through DoubleClick.

Beth Lawrence, executive vice president of digital sales for Discovery, says his company is “thrilled” with the results they’ve seen from last year’s trial.

“We’ve seen strong fill rates across our Apple News channels for Food Network, HGTV and Travel Channel, with a peak fill rate over 90%,” she said.

Thanks to Apple’s commitment to protecting user privacy, all advertisements that are served in News through DoubleClick have limited targeting features. Apple told Digiday that the available targeting capabilities include context-based targeting and audience-based targeting.

Contextual ads can be targeted based on:

The article’s publisher

The article’s content category within Apple News

The tags a publisher appends to the individual article

Audience-based ads can be targeted by:

A person’s location (only at the designated market area level)

Gender

Age group

Publishers get 100% of revenue from their Apple News ads sold directly.

Ad space on the News platform is officially sold by NBCUniversal on Apple’s behalf following the shuttering of iAd, the iPhone maker’s own ad-serving platform.